Russia’s Terrorist Road Map

Westerners, Americans in particular, often ask what we did to engender the violent hatred of Islamic terrorists. [Not us, by the way. Well aware of Western shortcomings and always interested in national self-improvement, we nevertheless believe nothing we have done or are likely to do justifies 9-11, the Sbarro pizzeria bombing in Jerusalem, or the perversion of Muslim children to believe that their lives are best spent preparing for a violent death.] Others wonder why, even though the USSR invaded and decimated Afghanistan, the particular fury of Islamists is directed at the U.S.

Westerners, Americans in particular, often ask what we did to engender the violent hatred of Islamic terrorists. [Not us, by the way. Well aware of Western shortcomings and always interested in national self-improvement, we nevertheless believe nothing we have done or are likely to do justifies 9-11, the Sbarro pizzeria bombing in Jerusalem, or the perversion of Muslim children to believe that their lives are best spent preparing for a violent death.] Others wonder why, even though the USSR invaded and decimated Afghanistan, the particular fury of Islamists is directed at the U.S. and Israel.

Regnar Rasmussen, a former military interpreter and interrogation specialist trained at the Danish Armed Forces’ Specialist School, worked as a Farsi translator in the immigration department of Danish Central Police. In the mid-1980s, he interviewed Iranians fleeing the Islamic Revolution and discovered that many had been communists in the time of the Shah and received guerrilla/explosives/terrorism training in the USSR. In an interview with Insight Magazine, Rasmussen described them:

After I had been face to face with a number of these, it dawned upon me that the step from being a glowing red communist to becoming a bloodthirsty Muslim fundamentalist is actually a distance equal to zero. Since then, I have seen these two categories as the two sides of the same coin. Communism and Islamic fundamentalism have more in common than what meets the eye. They share the same fundamental hatred against individualism and against individuals who wish to be happy and just enjoy life.

Romanian Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer to have defected from the Soviet bloc, provided details in a recent article in the National Review.

In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. … Andropov told me… The Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep… Terrorism and violence against Israel and her master, American Zionism, would flow naturally from the Muslims’ religious fervor, Andropov sermonized. We had only to keep repeating our themes – that the United States and Israel were “fascist, imperial-Zionist countries” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory.”

What to do with the information? Ramussen notes:

The Soviet system had a solid tradition of registering everything. We saw all the details meticulously noted down in every STASI report that came out after the fall of communism in 1989. I know that all the files of each and every single foreign student ever trained in the Soviet Union are still intact… If the new Russia wants to show her good intentions in the war against terror she should brush the dust off these old archives. If you trace down each and every single graduate you will also be able to see who in turn became his students or followers. The entire network that was set up by that generation in those days would become clearly visible.

It is crucial for the West to sever the relationship between terrorists and the states that harbor and support them. A road map provided by the Russian government would make it a lot easier.